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On May 21, 2020, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres tweeted that “a tsunami of misinformation, scapegoating and scaremongering [had] been unleashed,” alluding to seemingly false or misleading information on medical/public health aspects of COVID-19. The call to fight any information at odds with what has been dubbed the “scientific consensus” on COVID-19, was preceded, and has since been joined, by influential voices in dominant social institutions – governments, the medical profession, and public health agencies. It has also led to the emergence of a new field of inquiry, “misinformation studies”, along with a generalized messaging, in dominant circles, that suppressing perspectives contradicting official COVID-19 policy was a public health, national security, and moral imperative. While official policy has been unprecedented, in kind and scale, in world history, there has been scant critical interrogation of expert meanings and framings of “misinformation” in the COVID-19 context. Our critical scoping review will explore these meanings and framings as communicated by dominant social institutions, through their documentary production. We aim to summarize findings from diverse data, including peer reviewed and grey literature, produced by experts, as well as interrogate assumptions in the messaging of the documentary data. We also aim to assess the implications of identified linguistic and social practices for the health and well-being of populations affected by policies informed by the dominant concept of “misinformation”.

Attempting to predicting the formation of particular types of governance structures has been one of the central tasks of sociologists and political scientists. John Higley and Michael Burton argued that the configuration of elite groups in a society is an important predictor of the governance structure that develops in that society. The Higley-Burton theory outlines several ways in which the configuration of elites can predict the transformation of governance structures, from authoritarian regimes to liberal democracies. In the current research, this previous theoretical work is extended by articulating a route by which societies can go the other way—from democracy to an authoritarian regime. Turkey is being used as a contemporary case study to show how shifts elite configurations in a democracy can lead to authoritarian regime. A five-step process for this transformation is outlined. The steps in this model for one route of moving from an unstable democracy towards autocracy or dictatorship can be summarized as follows: 1) Political success by one group or faction. 2) Establishment of an inner circle and consolidation of power. 3) Replacement of the inner circle with weaker members who can be controlled. 4) Self-isolation of the leader. 5) Government control of opposition and suppression of dissent.

Comparing historical perceptions of three epidemics in the Philippines and the responses they elicited allows us to see how these disease outbreaks were conceived in terms of configuration, whether ecological or sociological, and contamination. Cholera in 1902, influenza in 1918–1919, and Covid-19 in 2020 each open up revealing cross sections through Philippine social life, culture, and governance. Furthermore, simplistic assumptions of contamination or pollution—in contrast to more complexly structured configurational models—are correlated with coercive or militaristic reactions to pandemics, including social distancing, lockdowns, curfews, and suppression of dissent. KEYWORDS: MEDICINE • SCIENCE • HISTORY • CHOLERA • INFLUENZA • COVID-19

The controversy over vaccines, which has recently intensified following the COVID-19 pandemic, provokes heated debates, with both advocates and opponents raising allegations of bias and fraud in re...

Mexican universities’ internal dynamics have been impacted by political adjustment policies under neoliberalism. Therefore, the institutions, programs, and professors are now managed using the logic of private enterprises providing educational services. As such, they are subject to measurements of their productivity which allow them to claim “high performance” to gain prestige and additional important economic resources. To deal with these developments, in many institutions of higher education, professors have organized as teams. However, such groups sometimes have been practicing suppression of dissent, mobbing, and “shunning” (excluding) competent faculty. Also, because of the economic crisis, highly qualified academics have ended up becoming administrators at universities, generating personal frustration and feelings of animosity toward professors that have a job they want for themselves. This chapter analyses a case in which one of these administrators exercises “sham dealing” and “sham peer review” to stop the institution from being listed as co-publisher of a book that a female professor was promoting. The impacts of these new scenarios at Mexican universities must continue to be addressed, and their negative consequences highlighted, because they work against their institutional goals.

Between 2006 and 2017, the political power in the Republic of Macedonia was predominantly held by the Christian-democratic party VMRO-DPMNE. Its increasing opposition to gender and sexual equality manifested, inter alia, in the imposition of an antidiscrimination law, which did not explicitly recognise sexual orientation as a ground of discrimination, the replacement of the rather liberal abortion law with a restrictive one, and the two attempts to constitutionally define marriage as a heterosexual union. Building upon earlier inquiries into the development of the LGBT movement in Macedonia and the introduction of the new abortion law, I examine here the discourse which the ruling coalitions used to justify the removal of the term ‘sexual orientation’ from the antidiscrimination law, and the need for a constitutional definition of marriage. I explore further how the authorities pushed their conservative agenda by undermining democracy through infringement of the official legislative procedures and suppression of dissent. In closing, I underline the retrograde impact of de-democratisation on the already and the yet to be attained progressive legislation and practices in the realm of gender and sexual equality.

This article explores the tactics that civilian activists used to influence U.S. War Department policies and U.S. Army procedures regarding conscientious objectors during World War I. The varying nature of civilian activists' tactics during the war points to a sustained desire to effect change and the important realization that in order to do so, activists had to remain “nonradical” in the government's eyes. Furthermore, activists operated during a time of intense government suppression of dissent, which made their desire to remain “nonradical” both more urgent and more difficult to achieve. This article concludes with analysis of an organization that activists carefully crafted to appear “nonradical” in order to effect radical change.

Thailand’s August 2016 constitutional referendum marked the second occasion on which a military junta has sought popular endorsement to legitimize its efforts to reform the country’s political system. As in the previous referendum of August 2007, Thai voters endorsed military plans to reduce levels of democracy. Draconian moves by the regime curtailed open debate about the content of the draft constitution, which virtually nobody had read. Partly as a result of the junta’s suppression of dissent, “No” votes declined — but the draft charter was still opposed by almost 40 per cent of voters, testifying to continuing high levels of political polarization along regional lines. This article argues that the referendum process may have helped the military to impose order on Thai society during the difficult period of royal transition, but did not create any genuine peace between the country’s fractious competing groups and interests.

The context within which midwifery students are professionally socialised is thought to impact upon the development of their sense of belongingness, their attitudes and values, and their commitment to the midwifery profession. Negative forms of socialisation are known to lead to undesirable outcomes including desensitisation about humanistic needs. This has potential to extend to an acceptance of workplace bullying and unfair treatment of others, including midwifery students whilst on clinical placement. This study aimed to explore how the social culture of the maternity setting influences midwifery students' experiences of being bullied whilst on clinical placement. One hundred and twenty midwifery students from Australia and the United Kingdom completed a qualitative online survey and the data was thematically analysed. One main overarching theme and four sub themes were identified. These were: 'the organisational culture of acceptance: "in front of"', 'brazen expression', 'group buy-in', 'suppression of dissent', and 'collateral damage'. Each of these factors enabled replication of the problem and led to perpetuation of the bullying cycle. This study illuminated that an entrenched culture of acceptance exists which impacts the students educational experience, the care received by mothers and babies, and the reputation of the midwifery profession.

China’s emergence as a major global power is reshaping the cyber domain. The country has the world’s largest internet-user community, a growing economic footprint and increasingly capable military and intelligence services. Harnessing these assets, it is pursuing a patient, assertive foreign policy that seeks to determine how information and communications technologies are governed and deployed. This policy is likely to have significant normative impact, with potentially adverse implications for a global order that has been shaped by Western liberal democracies. And, even as China goes out into the world, there are signs that new technologies are becoming powerful tools for domestic social control and the suppression of dissent abroad.Western policymakers are struggling to meet this challenge. While there is much potential for good in a self-confident China that is willing to invest in the global commons, there is no guarantee that the country’s growth and modernisation will lead inexorably to democratic ...

China’s emergence as a major global power is reshaping the cyber domain. The country has the world’s largest internet-user community, a growing economic footprint and increasingly capable military and intelligence services. Harnessing these assets, it is pursuing a patient, assertive foreign policy that seeks to determine how information and communications technologies are governed and deployed. This policy is likely to have significant normative impact, with potentially adverse implications for a global order that has been shaped by Western liberal democracies. And, even as China goes out into the world, there are signs that new technologies are becoming powerful tools for domestic social control and the suppression of dissent abroad.Western policymakers are struggling to meet this challenge. While there is much potential for good in a self-confident China that is willing to invest in the global commons, there is no guarantee that the country’s growth and modernisation will lead inexorably to democratic ...

ArgumentIn the 1970s a public controversy erupted over the proposed use of brain operations to curtail violent behavior. Civil libertarians, civil rights and community activists, leaders of the anti-psychiatry movement, and some U.S. Congressmen charged psychosurgeons and the National Institute of Mental Health, with furthering a political project: the suppression of dissent. Several government-sponsored investigations into psychosurgery rebutted this charge and led to an official qualified endorsement of the practice while calling attention to the need for more “scientific” understanding and better ethical safeguards. This paper argues that the psychosurgery debate of the 1970s was more than a power struggle between members of the public and the psychiatric establishment. The debate represented a clash between a postmodern skepticism about science and renewed focus on ultimate ends, on the one hand, and a modern faith in standards and procedures, a preoccupation with means, on the other. These diverging commitments made the dispute ultimately irresolvable.

Bouka offers a much-needed analysis of Burundi’s 2015 crisis as the culmination of the past decade of contentious politics in the country. This chapter examines the post-war governance of the National Council for the Defence of Democracy—Forces for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD-FDD) as it attempted to transition from an armed group to a political party, and how it became an obstacle to democratic consolidation. Bouka also explores the changes and continuity in the use of violence by political actors since the end of the war. This chapter concludes with an assessment of regional and international peace efforts and points to specific missed opportunities that have facilitated Burundi’s backsliding into authoritarianism.

This chapter considers six areas of understanding deriving from an analysis of the social teaching of the Anabaptists of the early sixteenth-century, which suggest possibilities for further research: pluralism in the early sixteenth-century as an idea before its time; pacifism; violent resistance and nonviolent conflict; secularism as an existential faith and the suppression of dissent; multicamerality; and the limits of tolerant pluralism.

The military regime that seized power in Egypt in July 2013 has suggested that the security personnel, rather than the unarmed protestors who died in the 25 January 2011 uprising, were the martyrs that the nation should celebrate. This rhetorical claim in support of authoritarian suppression of dissent must be understood in the context of the popular culture of the immediate post-Mubarak period, particularly the ‘martyr pop’ music video clips. This mass-media form disseminated a strategically ambiguous rhetoric that celebrated the martyrs but largely ignored the political cause for which they died. Such depoliticization of martyrdom suited the sensibilities of the intellectual class, whose economic and political investments in the hegemony of the neoliberal state outweighed their stated commitments to political change.

Dissenters from the dominant views about vaccination sometimes are subject to adverse actions, including abusive comment, threats, formal complaints,censorship, and de registration, a phenomenon that can be called suppression of dissent. Three types of cases are examined: scientists and physicians; a high-profile researcher; and a citizen campaigner. Comparing the methods used in these different types of cases provides a preliminary framework for understanding the dynamics of suppression in terms of vulnerabilities.

The paper seeks to explain the rationale of the militarize dispositions of politicians in the current democracy. It adopts descriptive and case history perspective, asserting that the behavioral trend is an outcome of the long years of military governance. The military rulership affects the executive, legislature, the judiciary and the civil society. The values and norms imbibe manifests in the practice of the current democracy. This explicates the use of force rather than dialogue in the suppression of dissent in 'Odi', and 'Zaki-biam', disobedience of the court orders, closure of media houses, the arrest of journalists and militancy as in the Niger-Delta . Democracy should be based on its values; the actors should learn these from the Center for Democracy, to replace the military ethos, which they display with recklessness in the democratic environment. It is instructive to note that the era of military rule can only end with good governance.

Although in many Muslim societies, there is a great deal of popular enthusiasm for strengthening criminal codes by relying on shari‘a rulings, Iran's Islamic experience of the past three decades has led to very different viewpoints about shari‘a and its compatibility with the modern legal structures of a Muslim-majority country. Studying the Iranian case shows how difficult it is to implement laws based on shari‘a. Moreover, the disillusioning experiences of clerical despotism since the Revolution of 1979, corruption, gross mismanagement of Iran's faltering economy, harsh suppression of dissent, and an even harsher stance on criminal justice (codified in the Islamic Penal Code) have provoked increasing alienation and anticlericalism in Iran.

In addition to the traditional political and civil service narratives, comparisons of data collected with the Public Service Bargain and Interpretive Approach frameworks suggest the emergence of a new narrative resulting in the maintenance of the the status quo within the politico-administrative system. The suppression of dissent ensures that politically sensitive information of public interest does not reach the public, that Departments run smoothly and that top civil servants increase their chances of promotion. This presents a challenge to the historical paradigm of the political-administrative dichotomy as it shows civil servants and Ministers as working de facto together in pursuit of their own, though not common, self-interest.

This is a book review of Ebenezer Obadare’s “Humor, Silence and Civil Society in Nigeria.” It examines conceptual issues around the role of civil society in Nigeria, the nexus (or lack thereof) between ngo’s and civil society, and the roles that humor and silence play as roles of agency in how a population responds to oppression and the suppression of dissent.

This article examines a small number of documentary films made since 2000 which focus on the post-genocide situation in Rwanda. It begins by tracing some of the debates about the contested versions of national unity and reconciliation produced by the RPF-led government, which seeks, at least at the level of its rhetoric, to transcend the politics of ethnicity and to end once and for all the culture of impunity which is seen as one of the root causes of the genocide. Acknowledging that the government has achieved a measure of peace and security in a relatively short space of time, critics argue that ethnicity is, however, still an issue in Rwanda and that there is an official RPF narrative — `we are all Rwandans now' — which many academics, journalists and NGO officials have bought into, while at the same time ignoring the elements of authoritarianism and the suppression of dissent which, it is claimed, mark the behaviour of the ruling, Tutsi-dominated elite. The documentary films are analysed in the context of these conflicting accounts of the complexities of the reconciliation process and are shown as cultural practices which reflect upon the contradictions and tensions manifested in the attempts to find top-down solutions to problems which require sensitive deployment of local knowledge, local resources and the experiences of everyday life in still predominantly rural Rwanda.

In 1976, the Church Committee, a Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, came to the conclusion that Martin Luther King Jr “was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ‘neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader”. This paper explores how the FBI surveilled Martin Luther King Jr between September 1957 and Dr King's death in 1968 and how such surveillance relates to both spatial compression and scale. First, using FBI internal memos, government documents, social movement archives, mass-media accounts, and other sources, I reconstruct this history of state surveillance, partitioning it into three sequential phases. Then, I shift from description to analysis, exploring how surveillance—operating through the social mechanism of intimidation—compressed both the physical and tactical space that Dr King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference could comfortably inhabit. This paper also theorizes the relationship between state surveillance and scale within the larger process of state suppression of dissent since scale both demarcates the boundaries where socio-political contestation occurs and also plays an important role in how these contests play out.

This article studies how organizations can choose dissent regimes that encourage organization members to express dissent in ways that provide the organization with informational benefits while minimizing the hazards associated with opportunistic behavior by members in the dissent process. Using a game-theoretic model, we demonstrate how logic-based and balanced rules of engagement can change various members' cost—benefit calculus in deciding whether to express dissent and thereby enable an organization to better balance the trade-off between capturing the benefits from constructive dissent and avoiding the hazards of destructive dissent.We then analyze how credibility problems faced by the leader may prevent organizations from adopting and implementing dissent regimes with such rules of engagement. We identify conditions under which an increase in the leader's reputational loss from opportunistic suppression of dissent can actually reduce the incidence of the adoption of dissent regime with rules of engagement, as well as the organization's profit. Finally, we explore implications of our analysis for the study of the role of informal leaders in organizational dissent, and for the relationship between dissent and organizational change processes.

Police monitoring of law-abiding activists at protest events. A CIA-sponsored program dedicated to investigating financial transac tions. An NSA initiative to collect data from massive numbers of domestic phone calls. The Pentagon's aborted Terrorism Informa tion and Prevention System, TIPS, and Total Information Awareness programs. The USA Patriot Act. Over the last half-decade, Ameri can citizens have been bombarded with a dizzying array of issues and controversies re lated to state surveillance initiatives. While the potential impact of surveillance activities is widespread-some claim, for instance, that the recent NSA program sought to obtain da ta from every call placed in the U.S.-its ef fects are most squarely centered on settings that pose a challenge to the institutional po litical status quo. It is clear that such efforts have enormous potential effects on the shape of political contention, and that these effects emerge in multifaceted ways. Rich historical accounts offer a window into these complexities. Take Jeremy Varon's Bringing the War Home, a compelling and nuanced chronicle of New Leftist militancy in the U.S. and Germany dur ing the 1960s and 1970s. Varon focuses on two organizations in particular: the Weather Underground (WU) in America and the West German Red Army Faction (RAF). While not a comparative study per se, he uses these two juxtaposed cases to develop a layered analysis of how activists in both countries came to embrace violent revolutionary ac tion, and how varied interactions with the state and civil society shaped their distinct trajectories. Policing agencies in both nations em ployed a variety of means to actively monitor and disrupt the WU and RAF. Surveillance through wiretaps, agent observation of pub lic events, illegal break-ins, and infiltration by informants and provocateurs-constituted the meat of the state's repressive efforts, at least in the U.S. Varon notes that, even be fore the Weatherman organization went un The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch US American Social Movements, by Jules Boykoff. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. 288 pp. $80.00 cloth. ISBN: 0415978106.

In its short history as a city-state, since 1965, Singapore has transformed itself from a declining trading post in the twilight of the British Empire to a first world, capital-exporting economy. This economic success has given this city-state a voice in the global economy beyond its small size. Detractors may dismiss Singapore’s economic success on account of both its smallness and its authoritarian political regime. For the more than three decades under the first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, leader of the People’s Action Party (PAP) which has been in power since 1959, there was ruthless suppression of dissent and opposition in the early days of its ascendancy to absolute political power. In subsequent years, the party modified election rules and procedures, practically ensuring its return to power in the five-yearly general elections. Undoubtedly, the absence of opposition shields the public service and enables the government to set and implement long-term plans without disruptions.

Recent discussions of rational deliberation in science present us with two extremes: unbounded optimism and sober pessimism. Helen Longino (1990) sees rational deliberation as the foundation of scientific objectivity. Miriam Solomon (1991) thinks it is overrated. Indeed, she has recently argued (2006) that group deliberation is detrimental to empirical success because it often involves groupthink and the suppression of dissent. But we need not embrace either extreme. To determine the value of rational deliberation we need to look more closely at the practice and practitioners of science. I offer a closer look here by exploring the joint agency of small research teams. Although there are factors that contribute to the suppression of dissent in group contexts, a closer look at the literature on group dynamics suggests that there are ways to mitigate the effects of groupthink. Thus, there is reason to be cautiously optimistic about the value of rational deliberation within certain scientific contexts.

In this 1970 essay, Transition founding editor Rajat Neogy criticizes those deemed African intellectuals by "notebook and pencil" visitors, distinguishing them from those Independence-era thinkers (himself included) who defended freedom of thought in the face of authoritarian suppression of dissent.

Muslim fundamentalism and Islamism are increasingly used as terms in the media and this article examines their meanings and genesis. It does so by looking at the teachings of its three primary ideologues, Hasan al-Banna, Abdul Al-Maududi and Sayid Qutb and comparing them to totalitarianism. It finds that there are substantial similarities, but also significant differences. The former involve the power of both Islamism and totalitarianism to mobilise the masses, ignoring class and religion, in order to combat exterior threat. In so doing, both replace the practice of religion with their own monopolistic ideology, relying on mass communication and suppression of dissent to construct a single party regime with the aim of conquering existing society which it believes has deviated from its ideal, creating a new man and reconstructing the state.

We introduce COLLANE, an experimental collaborative analytic environment that allows a group of professional analysts to work together effectively on complex, multifaceted information problems. COLLANE has been developed to investigate innovative ways of harnessing the power of collaboration so that to maximize the quality of the analytical product while at the same time controlling for its hidden costs: bias, groupthink, compromise, suppression of dissent and individual initiative. The key innovation that we are advancing in this project is the concept of ubiquitous tacit collaboration enabled through computer-mediated information sharing between the participants. By design, tacit collaboration requires no extraneous effort from the users since the information exchange is both automatic and targeted to what each analyst is currently doing. It also requires no specific "engagement" with subject matter experts since their continuous virtual presence assures ubiquity of collaborative opportunities. In this paper we describe an initial prototype of COLLANE, explaining its basic functions and components.

The story of Alice Paul's National Woman's Party and its 1917 picketing campaign on behalf of woman suffrage is almost unknown in legal circles. Yet the suffrage pickets were among the earliest victims of the suppression of dissent that accompanied the entry of the United States into World War I. Nearly forty years before the modern civil rights movement brought the concept of nonviolent civil disobedience to the forefront of American political discourse, the NWP conducted a direct action campaign at the very doorstep of the President of the United States, and they did so during a time of war. In the course of this campaign, Paul and her supporters learned to use the apparatus of the municipal courts and the prison system to focus attention on the powerlessness of women, while at the same time elevating their very real suffering to a kind of suffrage martyrdom. Their principal goal was to keep pressure on government officials so that the cause of woman suffrage would not be swept away in the wartime hysteria that gripped the nation in 1917. As the police regularly hauled them off to jail, however, the suffragists began to realize that their ability to pursue that goal hinged largely on the recognition of a constitutional right to free speech. This Article represents the first step in recovering this forgotten story. I present, for the first time, a detailed narrative account of the legal battles of the suffrage pickets of 1917, beginning with the first round of arrests in late June, and concluding with their victory in the Court of Appeals in March 1918. Although the women themselves did not directly shape legal doctrine, the saga of the suffrage pickets provides an excellent vehicle for examining the emergence of free speech consciousness during 1917. Bringing the story of the suffrage pickets to the attention of legal scholars may cause a significant reevaluation of the traditional narrative of First Amendment history.

Lewis Lapham, Theater of War, In Which the Republic Becomes an Empire, New York, 2002, 2003, The New Press, 278 p., 14.95 $ Lewis Lapham, Gag Rule, On the suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy, New York, The Penguin Press, 2004, 178 p., 19.95 $ Serge Halimi, Le Grand bond en arriere, Comment l’ordre liberal s’est impose au monde, Paris Fayard, 2004, 620 p., 23 euros Scott Lucas, The Betrayal of Dissent, Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and The New American Century, London, Pluto Press,...

Publisher Summary This chapter introduces a ubiquity model of groupthink or Janis's model of groupthink that specifies a revised set of antecedent conditions to explain the reason for groupthink-like behavior occurring in mundane, temporary, and even minimal groups and yet is not an invariant feature of group decision making. It mentions that Janis's probing and insightful analysis of historical decision making was correct about the symptoms of groupthink and their relationship to outcomes, such as the suppression of dissent, polarization of attitude, and poor decision quality and yet wrong about the antecedent conditions. The frequent failure to verify the more ambitious of Janis's predictions regarding the causal role played by the model's antecedent conditions stem from the general prevalence of consensus seeking, group polarization, outgroup stereotyping, and the suppression of dissent in a wide array of group settings. After some 30 years of investigation, the evidence has largely failed to support the formulation's more ambitious and controversial predictions, specifically those linking certain antecedent conditions with groupthink phenomena.

A process of thought and speech control relying on the strategic use of law has emerged in Europe and the U.S. Variants of the crimes of heresy, blasphemy and vilification are regaining force as effective means of suppressing dissent through criminal offense and civil sanction. New forms of these traditionally religious offenses are being used by governments and private interests that collectively have attained a degree of power that justifies placing them in the position of a secular or religious "church" - depending on the particular interests involved. Whether through the use of direct government power or informal but well-organized private collective action, these interests are intimidating critics into silence and punishing those who will not bow to their will. Both the Left and the Right use this strategy to seize power, stifle opposition and impose sanctions on anyone who does not bow to their preferences. Controls on speech are a core part of the strategy, and this is reaching disturbing levels in Western societies. This brings us to the vilification of Brigitte Bardot and Oriana Fallaci. Brigitte Bardot wrote A Cry in the Silence to counter what she perceived as the cowardice of European society, particularly France, that produced an unwillingness even to consider what she felt were dangerous impacts of extensive immigration into France of millions of people whose values and traditions not only differed radically from those of French culture but often explicitly rejected that culture. She was criminally prosecuted, convicted and fined for her comments. Oriana Fallaci authored The Force of Reason and several other works as a clarion call following the 9/11 tragedy. Her intent was to warn about what she considered the dangers of Islam for European society. Fallaci was recently charged in Italy with the criminal offense of "vilification." As the experiences of Brigitte Bardot and Oriana Fallaci indicate, the expanding limitations on what constitutes allowable discourse in the European Union and its members augurs forebodingly for freedom of expression. This is a dangerous time in Western society. It is a moment when the desire of governments to react to the threat of militant Islam produces responses that can destroy the essence of the Rule of Law. The problem is that it is easy to justify restrictions on speech due to the crisis psychology created by the fact we are in an unofficial state of quasi-martial law unfolding within an undeclared guerrilla war. My foundational principle is unsurprising and simple. No one and no institution should be insulated from political criticism in a democratic society. A free speech advocate remarked in admittedly crude terms that, "no one is [or should be] immune from being called an [expletive deleted]." This principle of allowing and encouraging free, open and even insensitive communication is nothing new in a democratic society where the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech, association and religion are core values instilled in the structure of our law and deepest beliefs. Oddly - given the mounting state and private pressure against freedom of speech, thought and conscience - democratic society needs to recommit to these core values more than ever. Unfortunately, we have most likely passed the "point of no return" in the degree to which we have corrupted our social discourse through inhibition and intimidation. At a minimum we must confront the extent to which we have suppressed free speech in the name of admirable causes. We must recapture the willingness to be insulted and to "call a fool a fool" or even to be one.